“Wade in the water”

7 Responses to “Wade in the water”

1. Bryan says:

   January 17, 2012 at 9:50 pm

   I saw this in L.A. last September, and the individual stories were good (well, perhaps a little more editing cohere those stories might have helped). The best parts were about surfers not in the U.S. (sometimes we’re a little too obsessed with race in America). And I enjoyed the chance to sit in a theater with surfers of color, and watch/listen to their reactions to the film. Maybe that aspect was the best part of seeing “White Wash.”

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2. SimonO says:

   January 17, 2012 at 10:20 pm

   a few years back I paid to go the beach out of Rome at Ostia. It was a stone covered ‘bayside’ beach, low visibility in the water, busy and crowded. You had to rent a deckchair if you wanted to spend time there, no spreading the towel and stretching out. We had an ok day once we realised the strangeness was mainly in our eyes. It invites me to look at the hot white sand beaches of my childhood with respect, appreciation and love all over again.
   I feel a sort of indignation like when I recall that city swimmers had to cover themselves up necktoknee, under threat of imprisonment, to go to the beach and frolic only one hundred years ago. It is a wakeup that I can’t almost imagine protesting for the right to swim and play, such is my sense of entitlement. Thanks for posting Dina

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3. dinamique says:

   January 17, 2012 at 10:53 pm

   We are definitely too obsessed with race in the U.S. I started to realize this when I saw the Henry Louis Gates/PBS series “Black in Latin America” (episodes can be streamed here if you live in the U.S.: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/black-in-latin-america/). It was interesting in that series to see how people of the African diaspora in other regions and former slave colonies approach concepts of race. Especially in Brazil. But at the same time, I see the validity of having conversations about race given the U.S.’s historical obsession and perpetuation of “race” through things like blood quantum, segregation, and little boxes in which you are often required to “check only one” and subscribe yourself to the arbitrary social construction that is race.

   I grew up in the U.S., but I wasn’t born here and my Egyptian ancestry–like so many others–is not clear cut, and cannot easily be stuck into one out of the four black, white, “hispanic,” asian boxes we are so often faced with when filling out paperwork. Growing up here means that my thinking is partially a product of U.S. racial discourses. So while it’s refreshing to learn about perspectives on race and identity that aren’t so U.S.-centric, I also understand and empathize with the reality of black surfers in the continental U.S. still feeling entrenched within overemphasized racial qualifications, having at times felt subject to those restrictions myself.

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4. Brine Time says:

   January 18, 2012 at 9:35 pm

   Not that we in Oz don’t have dark history. We simply removed the original Indigenous locals and put them into “white controlled “missions” hundreds of miles from their traditional lands. Yet surf culture here seems to accept that white “localism” is OK and you have to show respect. Odd and strange.

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5. Bryan says:

   January 23, 2012 at 7:24 am

   @ Brine Time…Your post reminded me that the surfing culture in Hawai’i accepts the same “localism” of natives or perceived natives/kama’aina of the Islands over whites/haoles/others (although the status of who exactly is kama’aina is not always clearly defined by mere ethnicity). And somehow this “reverse localism” is also OK because the Hawaiian people suffered so much at the hands of the Europeans/Americans. Perhaps equally “odd and strange.”

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   • SimonO says:

     January 30, 2012 at 7:05 am

     more on localism, connection to land, and a stewardship in today’s post Shacks http://kurungabaa.net/2012/01/30/shacks/ about a farflung community of beach lovers, biking, fishing and surfing who built their comfy hovels over a couple of generations – now calling for heritage listing their holiday community and lifestyle. It is worth a 3min squizz.
     I wonder how they might welcome boating newcomers wanting to share their patch? Or think about the agents tasked with protecting the environment, to ask them to leave in order to stop various degradations. Or the irony of them claiming a kind of ownership without paperwork or formal rights (it was my father’s, and his before him…).
     Entitlement – can make us narrow, proprietorial, and discourage self-reflection.
     Just saying, maybe travel really does broaden the mind.

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6. SimonO says:

   January 23, 2012 at 11:22 pm

   not sure how long it takes exactly but give anyone a few years in place and they seem able to feel some connection to geography, and the energetics of land-water and country. Though it seems difficult for some to transpose that connection and sense of ownership to others/Others who might have had a longer but different connection.

   Maybe odd and strange is how we get living away from the natural world…

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